Last month I moderated a panel of nonprofits sharing case studies about their integrated digital strategies. One of the case studies was about from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s content strategy and it featured a cute otter. Someone in the audience asked, “But what if your nonprofit doesn’t have cute animals for its content?” One option: Use quotes.

Audiences love inspirational, relevant, and timely quotes, especially if created in graphic, visual format. They work well on on social channels. Here’s some tips to help your nonprofit put this simple, but effective content type into use to reach your goals.

1. Integrate Into Your Editorial Process: Your organization no doubt has an editorial process where you brainstorm, plan, and produce content for various channels each month. Don’t forget to add a column in your editorial calendar spreadsheet for quotes as content. Batch create them so you have them ready to go each month. Pinterest is great place to showcase your quotes collections, take for example Edutopia’s “Pinspiration,” a pinboard of inspiring quotes.

Facebook Post from Edutopia

2. Pick Quotes That Resonate with Your Audience:Don’t use quotes for the sake of using quotes or because everyone else is using them. Pick quotes that resonate with your audience. For example (see above), Edutopia, a site that delivers content about education for teachers and others, uses inspiring quotes by educational leaders or quotes that speak to its specific content areas.

3. Timely Quotes: Piggy-backing on breaking news with content that relates it back to your organization’s work is a winning formula. One way to do this is to use a quote. For example, on Father’s Day, Edutopia posted this quote about dads.

4. Curate Quotes: Creating graphical quotes from scratch is time consuming, but remember you can also curate and share quotes from other sources. Just be sure to credit the original source. Pinterest is a great place to find and share quotes on other social channels. Simply do a search “Quotes about” and fill in what you are looking for. Here’s “Quotes about nonprofits.” Here’s some of the most popular boards that collect quotes on Pinterest.

5.Keep A Running List of Quote Lists by Topic: Keep a running list quotes and list of lists of quotes to get ideas for quotes. You can google for these, simply search for the word quotes and your topic keywords. Here’s two of my favorites, quotes on learning and social change.

6. Use Quote Finder Sites: . There are sites that make it easy to search for the perfect quote. Robin Good has identified some of the best here. My favorite is QuoteLand.

7 Make Them Visual: Here’s five free tools that can turn quotes into pretty pictures. I also like Canva for this task. Update: Susan Chavez just published a post with 9 tools.

Does your nonprofit use quotes as part of its content strategy? Share an example in the comments.

Beth,
This post really resonated with me. There’s a nonprofit I work with and their focus group is on ex-offender reentry – you can imagine how difficult it can be sometimes to generate positive “front-facing” imagery to get new prospects involved because immediately folks associate negative connotations given the focus area.